The Anatomy of a Great Painting

We often focus on the finished products, but, as someone who is very bad at making art, I’ve always been fascinated by the processes that (good) artists use to produce their work. The final pieces are stunning, but I feel a greater connection with artists when I can see their rough drafts. It helps me understand that talent goes hand in hand with hard work.

For example, before Michelangelo painted the Libyan Sibyl in the Sistine Chapel:

He produced painstaking anatomical studies to make sure that he got the priestess’ anatomy just right:

But how did Michelangelo get such a profound understanding of human anatomy? He surely used living models as the inspiration for his art. But he also did something else, something much more controversial.

To master the particularities of human anatomy, artists like Michelangelo took part in this sort of thing:

This image is from a book called Fasciculo di medicina, published in 1494 in Venice, when Michelangelo would have been an up-and-coming artist, fresh out of his apprenticeship. The image shows a lecturer presiding over the dissection of a cadaver as his students observe the dissection below. The book contains detailed anatomical diagrams like this:

Along with illustrations that demonstrate the fact that Renaissance-era science still had a way to go. This one associates various zodiac signs with parts of the body:

Michelangelo may have had access to books like this, but he also personally took part in human dissections. He began participating in the gory acts at the age of 18.

Dissection was a relatively new practice; it had been illegal in Europe for centuries, with a few rare exceptions (Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had allowed one dissection every five years so that doctors could learn anatomy).

It will not surprise you that the people whose bodies got sliced up for the edification of future doctors were from the bottom rungs of society — the most common dissection candidates were executed criminals, of whom there was a steady supply. The only other people whose bodies got dissected were, ironically, holy men and women whose bodies were sliced up to verify that they had indeed been blessed by the almighty (I wrote about one such corpse, the body of St. Francis Xavier, a while back — check it out!).

Dissections remained quite rare — and only for doctors — until Michelangelo’s era, when polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci and artists like Michelangelo were allowed to participate. Michelangelo’s contemporary Giorgio Vasari wrote that the artist was a fiend for dissection:

He was constantly flaying dead bodies, in order to study the secrets of anatomy, thus beginning to give perfection to the great knowledge of design that he afterwards acquired.

. . . In order to be entirely perfect, innumerable times he made anatomical studies, dissecting men’s bodies in order to see the principles of their construction and the concatenation of the bones, muscles, veins, and nerves, the various movements and all the postures of the human body; and not of men only, but also of animals, and particularly of horses, which last he much delighted to keep.

These gruesome rituals and the horrifying images they produced helped to create some of the most beautiful art in world history.

A dissection was a big event in early modern Europe. They are portrayed as crowded affairs, with onlookers jockeying for a good view. Here, some students peer into the cadaver’s body while others consult books, and an artist makes a sketch:

And here Andreas Vesalius, the most famous anatomist of the age, dissects a woman’s body in front of dozens of people and, weirdly, quite a few animals:

The results of these dissections were recorded in anatomy books, which became increasingly common in the 16th century. Michelangelo himself wanted to produce one after repeated dissections started to make him uncomfortable. His student Ascanio Condivi wrote that

. . . He gave up dissection because it turned his stomach so that he could neither eat nor drink with benefit. It is very true that he did not give up until he was so learned and rich in such knowledge that he has often had in mind to write a treatise, as a service to those who want to work in sculpture and painting, on all manner of human movements and appearances and on the bone structure, with a brilliant theory which he arrived at through long experience. He would have done it had he not doubted his powers and whether they were adequate to treat the subject properly and in detail, as someone would who was trained in the sciences and in exposition.

If Michelangelo didn’t have the skill to properly render human anatomy, who did? Lots of others, as it turned out.

The French anatomist Charles Estienne published a comprehensive guide (De dissectione partium corporis humani) in 1545, which showed the human body in various stages of disassembly:

Especially popular was the ecorche, or flayed man, with the skin removed to show the muscles underneath:

Some of these figures are staged in various poses, presumably so that people could understand the position of various muscles. Some artists got creative, like Giulio Bonasone, who depicts a man undressing himself from his skin:

Or reaching up to grab a rope:

Vesalius, whose 1555 book revolutionized the understanding of anatomy, also liked to show the partial human body in various states of activity:

And Domenico del Barbiere posed flayed men alongside their skeletons (I like that the guy on the right gets to keep his flowing hair if not his skin:

Some publishers even made little flip-books so that readers could see the various layers inside the human body. This one dates to 1538:

And this one utilizes color:

During this period of history, there wasn’t necessarily much distance between art and science.

Many of the anatomy texts of the 16th century were themselves works of art. Vesalius, for example, employed artists who had worked with greats like Titian, and the images in his book often contain little flourishes like a Roman ruin or a mountain range in the background, showing that his concerns were artistic as well as educational.

And it wasn’t too much of a distance between those gnarly anatomical texts with their weird skeletons and flayed men and something like this, drawn by Michelangelo in the 1510s:

And then to the legs of his sculpture of a dying slave, made around the same time:

I find it fascinating that the sublime art of the Renaissance depended on hours spent in the tedious and disgusting task of slicing up and documenting the bodies of poor people and criminals. The Renaissance study of anatomy not only revolutionized the practice of medicine, it brought the world some of its most affecting art.

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